West and Soda

A Christmas-time staple on Italian TV for years and only the third animated feature to emanate from Italy (after 1949's THE SINGING PRINCESS and THE DYNAMITE BROTHERS). A delightful if patchy parody of the Western that is well-suited to the rough, stylized animation on display and featuring a handful of superbly realized and voiced characters – particularly the belatedly introduced laconic gunfighter hero Johnny and the land-grabbing chief villain Cattivissimo. Also on hand are damsel-in-distress Clementina, her alcoholic dog and talking cows, red-headed saloon gal Esmeralda, Cattivissimo's fat and lean henchmen (Ursus and Slim, respectively) and assorted marauding Indians. Set to a fine Western-styled score by Giampiero Boneschi, one of the film's highlights comes towards the midpoint (in a sequence drawn in silhouette) where the complex-ridden Johnny receives the mother of all beatings in his first visit to the saloon.

I don't need to spend many words in praise of this work. Just watch it and enjoy the countless wits and funny situations which make this movie unique and delightful to see even 30 years after its release. Bozzetto shows you how to create a master-work out of good ideas and little money. Clearly this is a cartoon aimed to adults for its humor based on mocking "western" stereotypes, something that requires at least some knowledge of the matter. Definitely a cult movie.

The movie its good for its gender. It works really well, both the comedy and the aesthetic. The style is really cool, the pointillism is not very common. But, it had bad moments, or in general, a really hard to follow pacing. Also, the translation isn´t very good, so it's better to watch it in Italian. I only recommend it if you want to see something with a different taste, different animation aesthetic and good sarcasm and humor.

As I watched this I got the feeling that some foreigners watched a couple Westerns & decided to make a cartoon based on it. The story is so remedial- like kids in 4th grade wrote it. Most of it didn't make sense & it didn't flow. It was stilted & drab. Ho hum boring. There's odd parts like when a cowboy asks a saloon girl to come over to him at the bar & the saloon girl feels his crotch & a cowboy who instead of paying for his drink sticks his finger in his nose. That's supposed to be funny? Another thing, whenever the cowboys laugh instead of "ha ha ha" it's "itch, itch, itch". A lot of things like that are off. And way too often the subtitles are wrong, on simple stuff too. You can tell they're not familiar with Western terms or how Americans talk. The animation doesn't make up for it. The drawings are amateur. This definitely does NOT deserve a rating of 7. No way! Think about it.... Disney, Pixar, & DreamWorks animation have a hard time getting ratings over a 5. I do not recommend this. It was a chore getting thru the whole thing to the end.

It's not (just) how good you are in life but what language you speak or where you are from... or whether you can get your product out there or not. If the Duomo di Monreale was in Rome or Florence or Paris it would be regarded as just about the greatest church in Christendom... but it is just outside Palermo in Sicily, so who cares? Dutch anthropologists apparently came up with symbolism over a generation before Levi-Strauss, but who reads Dutch? Australian films pre-war were some of the best in the world... before the US film studios stitched up distribution and killed them all off. And who cares what rubbish your fizzy carbonated drink is, as long as it is the only one which gets distributed?

Likewise it is with this gem of a cartoon Western, as fabulous at satirising the genre as all the Italian spaghetti Westerns of its time, most of the most famous of which it should vastly outrank in reputation. But it doesn't, and barely exists as a distant footnote in cinema history. Italy was not remotely a cartooning power like the US or Czechoslovakia, so how could they make a fabulous full-length cartoon Western spoof? In fact, it is memorably good - I saw it as a child and am still impressed over 40 years later - and mixes serious plot with parody. It is that clever mixture of proper Western drama with an unmistakable cartoon satire which ultimately gives it its winning character. The inevitable final gunslinging shootout in the street is pure genius, and so much more clever and artful than the equivalent end-scenes which some famous spaghetti Westerns are famous for.

One of the many obscure films which would constantly be celebrated if only they had and had had a wider audience. Out of an American studio.